May 2008

CLICK! submission Photo credit: Elyse Taylor

A current exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (BMA) called CLICK! is a great example of the creative role that museums can play in utilizing the web to involve users.  Click! is a multi stage project.  First, there was an open call for photographs for the exhibit on the theme of the “Changing Faces of Brooklyn.”  Then an open call for evaluation of the submitted photographs online was issued.  Finally an exhibit at the museum of the top 20% of the 389 photos submitted was assembled.  But that isn’t all.

There is also an exhibit of all the photographs, and multiple statistical views of the voting.  These results include very interesting data about the relative ratings of the raters (self-identified in 5 categories from naive to expert), along with a host of other data. I found this information as interesting as the exhibit itself.  Begging won’t help.  You’ll just have to visit the site yourself to find out how the ratings of experts compared to the ratings of the non-experts.  The site has lots of other great features, including an intelligent commentary, a look into the process of mounting the physical exhibit, the comments of raters about the photos, a blog, a podcast, and, novel to me, [click to continue…]

Tagged as: Brooklyn, Brooklyn Museum, Eastern Parkway, Elyse Taylor, Flatbush Avenue, Grand Army Plaza, New York City, Prospect Park, Richard Meier, Union Army, Union Temple, Vanderbilt Avenue

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Peekaboom is a blast.  It’s a totally addictive online game that also contributes raw data to CBIR researchers.

“We introduce Peekaboom, an entertaining web-based game that can help computers locate objects in images. People play the game because of its entertainment value, and as a side effect of them playing, we collect valuable image metadata, such as which pixels belong to which object in the image. The collected data could be applied towards constructing more accurate computer vision algorithms, which require massive amounts of training and testing data not currently available.

Peekaboom has been played by thousands of people, some of whom have spent over 12 hours a day playing, and thus far has generated millions of data points. In addition to its purely utilitarian aspect, Peekaboom is an example of a new, emerging class of games, which not only bring people together for leisure purposes, but also exist to improve artificial intelligence. Such games appeal to a general audience, while providing answers to problems that computers cannot yet solve.” Peekaboom: A Game for Locating Objects in Images

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Tagged as: Artificial intelligence, Computer, Computer vision, Games, Metadata, Online game, Pixel, Video game

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Eden as depicted in the first or left panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights Hieronymus Bosch Image via Wikipedia

The potential usefulness of well cataloged images seems enormous.  Images can open up avenues of thought and research previously unavailable, not just within the narrow category that the image may be typically associated with (whether that be art history, architecture, geology, or some other area) but across disciplines, and into wholly new areas.  While cross disciplinary studies are not new, ready access to the whole store of images would greatly facilitate and stimulate further work by artists, economists, historians, and doctors, among others, independently and collaboratively.  Leaving aside the myriad barriers posed by expense, expertise, technology, and legal considerations (including copyright), and the differing views about priorities and cost allocation, here is my attempt to articulate an ideal.

Universal, scalable, trustworthy, sustainable, and permanent access to all heritage digital images from the publicly accessible to the privately held, including those from all museums and cultural institutions, archives and libraries, private collections, and publishers, using a system of organization that maximizes entry points and interconnections between objects and relevant texts, to facilitate retrieval for all imaginable purposes, through interfaces which have the capability of searching across all platforms, providing high resolution images, thumbnail browsing, copying and reuse for non-commercial purposes, and links to contextual materials, with continuously updated information of the applicability of worldwide copyright status and contact information for obtaining permissions.

This ideal is more utopian than anything; this is what brought Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights to mind as a good illustration here.   My utopian ideal does provides a context for looking at what exists, and what is evolving.  If there could be agreement about the goal, however unrealistic at present, this could inform the current and developing practices at critical institutions.

Since first writing this piece, The Garden of Earthly Delights has become a prime example of a different aspect of ideal access to images.  Google Earth chose to render this painting, along with  13 others at the Prado,  in unimaginably high resolution.  The detail below is of the face of the monkey that is  sitting atop an elephant in the distance, about a third of the way from the top of the picture.   In the thumbnail of the painting here, the monkey is barely detectable.

Garden of Earthly Delights - detail of moneky face

To view this painting in this way is truly breathtaking.   Google’s accomplishment far exceeds my imagination; maybe the rest of the utopian dram described above is also possible.

I must  unfortunately note the Museo del Prado’s non-existent subject search capability.   While the collections page does say that search by subject is possible: “Access on line to approximately 2000 works of the Museum’s collection. …This data base will enlarge until it holds the complete collection….The advanced search engine facilitates consultation, using categories such as artist, title of work, subject, chronology and reference number…” in fact it is not.   The advanced search has drop down boxes with NO options, and “subject” is not even one of them.   On top of that, the word “Chronology” is misspelled.  The Prado’s aspiration to digitize and share the entire collection is admirable, but image cataloging and search functionality should go hand and hand with the digitization.  It is well known that once the digitization process is complete it is very rare for more metadata to be added at a later time.

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Tagged as: Art history, Copyright infringement, Digital image, Garden of Earthly Delights, Google Earth, Hieronymus Bosch, Museo del Prado

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